Barriers
by Scarabbug
Summary: Stop. Take a deep breath. Listen for the speed barrier breaking in your heart. One shot. Contains SPOILERS for Sonic X Season Five.


**I am one of**** the rare people who ****like**** this kid. Yes indeed. He has potential**** for a lot of stuff****. I mean, c'mon, for the entire third series he was an eighteen year old stuck in a twelve year old's body, if you can't think of anything cool to do with that... **

**Anyway, this c****ontains ****SPOILERS**** for the ending of **_**Sonic X **_**season ****f****ive**** (series three)****Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated.

* * *

**

Barriers.

Eighteen years old.

It's _good_ to have a body that fits his age again. He'd been a little worried after what Eggman said about the Emerald and the transfer process. The eighteen year old him would never have gotten into one of Tails' vehicles, but Chris doesn't have to worry about that anymore. And there are exams to pass when he gets home. Big ones. Important, life changing ones, but he isn't too worried about that, because he always passes with flying colours.

_Flying colours_. That's a phrase Chris knows would work really well for many of his friends, both in this world and the other. He remembers the Blue Typhoon and the artificial palm trees, the soft pink of Cosmo's light in her death, and Sonic, also blue and bright, grinning in a vacuum that would suffocate a human.

Thinking about them makes Chris's chest ache. He knows it would be better if he just tried not to think about the other world at all, but he can't help it. He spent six years obsessing over that place, and he had to leave again so quickly. Letting go is... hard. But the portal doesn't work anymore, and there's no way back, so...

Grandpa says that this is how he tries to think about Chris's grandmother. He thinks about her alive and smiling, just like Sonic, even though, unlike Sonic, she has been dead for as long as Chris can remember. When it hurts, as it often does, Grandpa just tells him to take a deep breath and listen. Whenever he does that, Chris hears the speed barrier breaking in his mind. It's almost enough.

He remembers Mobius. The depth of colour and tones that probably didn't even exist in his world. Like seeing everything through magnified glasses, painted in bright colours. He guessed that was the reason Sonic always seemed so bright in his world. He remembers trying to explain it to the people back home, and the words never coming out right. He wished he'd taken more pictures. They told the story better.

* * *

He doesn't usually go near the swimming pool anymore.

It's been empty since three summers ago, anyway. Nobody in the house now is really up for stuff like that, and anyway, it reminds Chris of meeting Sonic. It feels kind of strange now, to walk around the estate and look at once full rooms which feel empty all over again, now that he's lost them a second time round. When he moves into the flat with Francis, it feels emptier still.

He prefers flying to staying on the grounds, taking off and imagining death-defying creatures hanging onto the wings of the plane. When he mentioned that to Francis, he had laughed, and told Chris all about this creepy American horror movie about a plane and a little demon.

Francis doesn't really understand.

* * *

Helen listened to every word, whether she understood or not. He tells her everything, about every one of them, second for second. Sonic, and Tails and Amy and Shadow and Knuckles. Vector and Charmy and Espio...

He has to stop for a while when he reaches Cosmo. But that's alright, because Helen can wait. And she even says that it's okay for him to get upset about it –someone had told her once, she said, that it was okay to sometimes get angry about the things she'd lost or wasn't able to do, and to cry for reasons she didn't understand. Apparently it was the people who _never_ reacted to those kinds of things who you had to watch out for. It's okay or him to remember around her.

And he does remember. He remembers everything, from first arrival in too-large clothes to the last journey in the capsule.

He remembers the seed of a universe-destroying creature, or plant, or whatever it truly was, pulsing in the depths of space. He remembers a gravity field which felt as if it was ripping the skin from his bones and turning his organs inside out. He remembers realising that maybe the most horrible sound in the world was the sound Tails made when he cried. He remembers a pane of glass shattering in front of his face, exposing him to a vacuum. The screaming single eye of Black Narcissus, and Cosmo's fear before he fell. He remember sShadow. He remembers imagining his friends wondering why he never said good bye, but Sonic knowing anyway. Running beneath the capsule, smiling.

Those things are harder to think about. They hurt more. But he just holds Helen's hand, and remembers what Grandpa told him.

_Stop. Think. Take a deep breath and listen. _The good memories are there in his mind as well as the bad ones. There's no need for him to be afraid anymore. They'll all be okay.

They _are_ okay.

And so is he.

* * *

Graduation also isn't as terrifying as he'd thought it might be. Maybe that's because nothing really scares him too much anymore. Not after the end of the universe, and everything... Francis freaks out a little but he handles it too. And when Chris sees Helen afterwards, dressed in green and with pink flowers wrapped around the handles of her chair, she kind of reminds him of that other world – bright with colours that shouldn't exist.

He remembers the Master Emerald and how it shattered into a million pieces. The green matches the colour of Helen's dress. All those shades and variations.

It's not so different here to how it is in Sonic's world, when you think about it. And home is with the people that you care about, not necessarily your location. He knows that now. Maybe he's known it for years. It makes him miss them all the more, but it also reminds him: homes change, just as people do. But you can always remember them.

Helen lets him hold her up when they dance, and Chris wishes they had a rock to smash but they don't, and you can't go around smashing rocks in a dance hall, anyway. (Nope. Not a good idea). But they manage just fine anyway.

Chris realises that he loves her. The way he's hardly loved anyone before. When it comes to Sonic, it's almost a good exchange. She was worth coming home for.

* * *

Sonic would have loved the fireworks.

So would Tails, for that matter. Knuckles would've complained about them but secretly enjoyed it anyway. Amy would've called them romantic, at which point everyone would have stopped listening to her and Cream... Cream would be Cream. Watching enraptured, smiling through her too-large eyes. And Rouge would have been looking for an opportunity to sneak in and steal stuff while everyone else was distracted, but she'd _still_ probably take the chance to bug Knuckles in the process and...

Yeah. Chris knows they'd love this.

The gunpowder explosions fill the sky like the echoing resonance of a million Planet Eggs, just like it had been at the rebirth of the world and the death of Cosmo. Chris remembers everything standing in the shadows of the university courtyard, watching the Graduation ceremony coming to a noisy, brilliant close overhead.

It's beautiful here, Chris realises. Exciting, and bright, and he wishes so badly that...

No. _Stop. _

_Deep breath._

_Listen for the speed barrier breaking in your heart. _

_He is _not_ gone. He will _never_ be gone.__ He runs inside of you. _

Chris opens his eyes and smiles up at the sky.

It kind of works.

* * *

**Fin.

* * *

**

_"When it hurts, when you doubt__When it burns, let it out,__When you give, when you love __When you live, when you touch._

_If all that we've got is each other__then__ all that we got is a lot_

_The feeling inside you is feeling like__I do.__Take a breath, l__et it out_

_Just close your__eyes__ don't hold it inside you__B__reathe."_

-Bon Jovi, "Breathe".


End file.
